This year the fifteenth of August, a date that stands for liberation in Korea, is also the day of my departure. I had a surprisingly good sleep and I really hated getting up this morning. Really, I can't remember the last time I wanted to stay in bed so badly. I took a taxi to the airport, because I thought I was running late and I wanted to make sure I don't miss the flight today. It's happened before and I rather pay the cab fare than all the other stuff that comes along with arriving at the check-in counter five minutes after it's closed.
The driver was a super friendly guy, carefully talkative, but not at all annoying. If I hadn't been so occupied with my phone, I would have been glad to strike up a real conversation with him. Still, we got to chat a little and he seemed very interested in geography. At the airport I checked the flight information and it turned out I still had some time on my hands. I knew that my friend Haneul was at the airport, too. She sent off a friend of hers earlier and we met up and had a wonderful cup of coffee.
Before check-in I had to confirm my reservation and the lady who helped me doing so by scanning my passport was, for some reason, super nice to me. She asked me if I had made any changes and I said no, but if possible I would like to have an aisle seat. She checked and said that the flight was fully booked, but that there were a few seats left that cost an extra hundred and tweny Euros. I said mh, and she said she could maybe just give me one of those. I followed her to the desk and lo and behold, she really could.
While I was waiting at the gate to board the plane I looked through the people standing around and snap, I suddenly saw Andreas, a teacher and a friend of mine who I met at the KLTI. It's unbelievable how this trip is surprising me till the very end. Next to me on the plane sat a man called Hector. He's a sixty year old guy from Chile who lives in Norway and works in Korea. He started traveling the world at age seventeen and it was fun to listen to his stories. His English was perfect, but instead of Germany he kept saying Yermany.
The flight was close to eleven hours and I barely slept. Not because I couldn't, but because I didn't want to. What I wanted to do was think about this trip and jot down bits and pieces to catch up with my blog entries. The food wasn't too good, but I liked the breakfast which was pasta and bread. The hours just passed one by one and it didn't feel like flying across the globe into a country thousands of kilometers away. It felt like a bus ride from one place to another. It just took over ten hours.
My stop-over was alright, too. Only two hours to my connecting flight to FRA. I think Shiphol is probably one of the few airports where the free wifi is actually free. At least for two thirty-minute sessions. I used it to send messages to my friends and let them know what was up on my end. And before I was even ready I had to get up and find gate B8. Then another fifty minutes in the air and there I was, back in Yermany and on my way home.
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